


Love, or Something Stranger

by sea_level



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Getting Together, M/M, Pining, Sentinels and guides are not known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:43:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sea_level/pseuds/sea_level
Summary: He accepts that Gatsby is larger than life because he can feel it in his bones that this is a man he can trust. There exists about him an overpowering serenity that relaxes Nick and puts to rest worries he never even knew he had.





	Love, or Something Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> ok so if you're not familiar with the whole sentinel/guide thing, there's this tv show called the sentinel that i most certainly didn't watch. the basic idea is that one character is a sentinel who has like super enhanced senses and another character is a guide (more of a fandom idea than a canon one) who helps the sentinel manage their senses and, in some versions of the trope, is on some level empathetically gifted. a sentinel generally comes "online" later on in life thru like trauma or age or whatever
> 
> anyways Nick and Gatsby certainly don't know this in the course of the story, but Nick is aware of the change in his senses

When Nick meets him for the first time, the world seems to sharpen around him. He sees with a kind of crisp clarity that it's impossible for him not to wonder if he had been walking around visually impaired for his whole life.

The man doesn't seem to be having the same religious experience. His eyes are sharp and his voice witty as his hands move about artfully describing some drab, French town that had both apparently been to at some point during the War.

Nick shakes the urge to catch the man's hand out of the air (and, really, where had that come from?), smiles, and offers up his own anecdote about a town a little further south. While his mouth runs, his mind wanders. The man is engaged, eyes carefully trained on Nick like he's hanging onto every word that comes out of his mouth. It's not overdone, but it is actual, genuine interest, though only in the socially acceptable way.

He's not like Nick, who's caught the scent of the other man's perfume, and suddenly it's the only thing filling his mind, keeping him grounded and focused here on their conversation instead of being drawn away by the rest of the party. Thank goodness for his ability to weave a story, to keep the narrative going despite his ongoing mental crisis.

When he comes to a natural end, the man brings up a recent purchase of his—a hydroplane—and invites Nick to try it out with him.

Nick's heart leaps at the invitation unbidden. He can't explain it or reason it away, but, despite his own hesitance at his own emotional reaction, he can't really see a good reason to deny the man. "I would love to," he says, just as Jordan appears behind him.

"Enjoying yourself?" she asks.

"I am," Nick says by default, but it doesn't take much reflection to know that it's the truth. "This is all very new to me. I've never before been to a party so large that I've yet failed to find the host."

A small sadness passes over the man's face. "Ah, I am he. I'm Gatsby." He shakes his head. "I'm afraid I've been a terrible host."

Guilt sweeps over Nick unbidden, and he feels suddenly like he's committed some terrible wrong to make the man—Gatsby feel like he's failed. Nick's jumping at the bit to assure him that he's done nothing wrong when a door opens and a man peeks out to inform Gatsby that he has a call.

Gatsby smiles apologetically but still bright and brilliant and then he passes through the door, and Nick is left feeling like there's some kind of gap in his heart that certainly wasn't there before.

\--

Nick gets home late. He's tired enough to dismiss without much thought the fact that he can still smell the party despite the considerable distance between Gatsby's mansion and his own cottage.

He's also tired enough to ignore how much the toothpaste burns at his gums or how unusually rough his sheets feel against his skin.

He falls asleep to increasingly incoherent thoughts about Gatsby. The curve of his lips as he smiles, the creasing at the corners of his eyes. What it might be like to touch him, to lose himself in the sensation of skin on skin on skin on skin on skin—

\--

He sees Gatsby again, on the date that they'd agreed to meet.

Out on the hydroplane, Gatsby spins stories, things that sound imagined and surreal, but Nick believes them because he believes Gatsby.

He accepts that Gatsby is larger than life because he can feel it in his bones that this is a man he can trust. There exists about him an overpowering serenity that relaxes Nick and puts to rest worries he never even knew he had.

What little contact they have (a bump here and there as the boat jumps in the water or someone reaches over to fetch something) wakes something up inside Nick, some world of new possibilities that he's yet to fully realize. Something to reflect on if he dares. Something sweet and honeyed and warm and home in the way that Chicago never did after the War, in a way that even his mother's cooking could not contest.

Nick lets himself get swallowed up in the melodic tones of Gatsby's voice and in some strange, unspoken and likely unrequited dream of the future. It's enough to forget the sting of water droplets on his face or the smell of salt in the water, somehow stronger now more than ever before.

He briefly wonders if this is love or if something stranger is going on in his brain. Nick is certain he's been in love before, and it really didn't feel like this.

\--

Daisy's house, or the Buchanan mansion, is a new experience the next time he sets foot past the threshold. It's complete chaos. Beautiful in its design, as it was before, but there are scents layered on scents, an incredible amount of sensory activity swarming about him that it threatens to overwhelm.

The sun shines too bright off the marble and Nick finds himself longing for something.

He can't quite place it. He's eliminated his childhood bedroom and the spot beneath the stairs in an old library he used to visit from time to time when Daisy arrives. She smells sweet, like roses, but certainly much less subtle. He wonders how much the fragrance had cost, to get that strong of an effect.

Whatever sum he imagines, he reasons it would be like spare change for a man of Tom Buchanan's wealth.

\--

All good things must come to an end, Nick supposes. His time with Gatsby steadily begins to decrease until it ceases altogether, directly inverse to the time Gatsby begins to spend with Daisy.

Nick supposes he should be happy to see Gatsby so pleased, but something shatters in him. He should have been ready for this inevitability. Gatsby was never going to feel the same way for him. To fall in love so quickly was something special, so rare that the odds Gatsby might be struck with the same affliction—astronomical.

He deals with the same way that he dealt with the war. He allows his work to consume him, head dizzy with how strongly he can smell the ink. He spends a little time with Jordan but refuses drink. Alcohol always seemed to mess with his head a little too much after that first day. At night, he returns home, crawls underneath his too-rough blankets, and stares at the minuscule cracks in the paint on his ceiling with his ears tuned in to the cars as they rush across the highway miles away.

Without Gatsby, Nick’s heart starts to bear a kind of empty quality, and he quite forgets what he’s even trying to achieve in New York. It’s not healthy. He knows this, but the sheets are scratchy and the dried tears on his face make his skin itch more than the one time his brother put itching powder on his clothes.

\--

Gatsby seems empty too.

A little desperate, a little grasping, like his newfound relationship with Daisy isn’t all that he'd imagined it to be.

Despite all the jealousy that Nick knows still lingers in the back of his mind, Nick finds himself desperately wanting to make everything better. “You can’t live in the past,” he tells Gatsby. “At some point, everyone must move on.”

Gatsby doesn’t look at him at first, but he does pat Nick’s arm, the first contact they’ve made in months, despite the layers of clothes between. “After everything,” Gatsby says, “I can. I will.” He sighs. "I must."

\--

Gatsby can’t.

Despite his best attempts to hang on, Nick can spot the moment when everything starts to collapse.

The temperature runs high and the smell of sweat hangs heavy in the air. Despite the fact that it’s everything Nick can do to hang on, he can _smell_ the bitterness of Tom’s anger, of Daisy’s fear. Whatever Gatsby’s feeling—despair, embarrassment, indignation—it smells a bit like a freshwater river in a storm.

Everything spiraling quickly and it’s all Nick can do to keep up.

He catches something strange from Daisy, something he can’t quite place, and then she says, with her voice shaking wildly, “ _Please_ Tom, I can’t stand this anymore.”

Nick hopes the situation will defuse, but Tom can’t seem to let it.

“By all means,” he says. “Gatsby, why don’t you take her home.”

Nick catches a flare of something dangerous from Gatsby and says, before he can even think, “I think I’ll join you.”

Tom looks at him challengingly, but Nick ignores it, already moving toward the door.

On their way down the stairs, Nick catches Gatsby’s hand and takes the car keys from his hand. “I think I’ll drive,” he says, and, to his surprise, Gatsby lets him without protest. When he glances back, he catches Daisy looking at them with an appraising look in her eyes.

They make it home safe, but Nick feels hypersensitive all night. Even his own clothes are too much sensation for him to handle.

The waves, which he knows are lapping gently on the shore, sound like a waterfall to his ears.

\--

Morning finds Nick awake still, sitting in his kitchen in little but his undergarments. His brain feels like mud, the constant over-stimulation bringing him to a sad, anticlimactic standstill. When a knock sounds out from the door, it’s all Nick can do to drag himself off of his chair.

It’s Gatsby. A Gatsby who’s seen better days and blinks at Nick’s state of undress with more than a little confusion, but it’s him.

“Am I interrupting anything?” he asks, courteous.

Nick tries to speak, but his vocal cords feel weird and he coughs instead of speaking. “No—nothing, I—” he manages, and steps back so Gatsby can come inside. “I’ll just, I’ll—uh.”

Gatsby offers a Nick a sympathetic smile and Nick retreats back to his room, rubbing at his throat. The air has quieted considerably, and his clothes don’t feel quite as horrible as they did before.

He emerges a minute later to find Gatsby in his living room, staring at the clock.

“I must confess,” Gatsby says without preamble, “I’m not quite sure what I’m doing in New York anymore. All this opulence doesn’t have quite the same effect on me as it once did.”

Nick supposes it wouldn’t be right to tell him that the only reason he's here anymore is for him. New York had lost its novelty a long time ago.

Gatsby doesn’t let Nick’s silence grow awkward. Gatsby says, “I’m thinking to move west this time. Perhaps California, but I think I might not enjoy it as much without companionship.”

It’s an invitation to something bigger than Nick could have ever fathomed.

“I would love to,” Nick says. He could never forgive himself if he let an opportunity like this slip by. “I would love to go with you if you’d have me.”

Gatsby smiles, small and genuine and maybe a little relieved, and Nick’s heart does something funny. He’s brought back to that first night, the way that Gatsby had smiled then and set Nick’s world alight. The way he’d known then that he’d do anything to see it again.

“I’m glad,” Gatsby says, and he takes one of Nick’s hands in his. Nick zeroes in on the physical contact, the way that all the sensations around suddenly feel a lot more manageable, the way he feels safe and content and _home_.

Gatsby looks a little helpless then, like he’s uncertain what to say next. He leans down instead, pressing his lips lightly against Nick’s. It’s brief and hesitant, more of a question than a declaration.

Nick reaches up with his free hand and rests it on Gatsby’s neck, pulling him closer and marveling in the sensation, in the joy that comes from even the hint that Gatsby feels the same.

They break apart but don’t separate.

“You know,” Gatsby says, “a very smart man once told me that I couldn’t live in the past and that I had to move on.”

“Yeah?” Nick asks, marveling at the way Gatsby’s skin feels under his fingers.

“I didn’t see it until I stepped away from everything that I was clinging onto, but I feel that, in the course of spending so much time looking backward, I missed something more important that was standing right in front of me.” Gatsby smiles. “There was always something about you. I’ve felt it from the moment I first met you, even if I was too distracted to realize it.”

“I’ve loved you for months now,” Nick tells him, emboldened, “practically from that first party. You set something alight inside of me. I mean this with no exaggeration, but I experience the world differently now. Sights, smells, sounds, sensations all stronger because of you, I’m sure of it.”

For the strangeness of the declaration, Gatsby seems to take it in stride, the softness in his eyes never fading as he cups Nick’s face in his hands and kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> it's finals week but my brain literally refused to study until i wrote this and that was painful but i did it and now i can think about math.
> 
> i've been vaguely itching to write a sentinal au (alongside other tropes because i tend to like tropes more than characters...) and i had a vague sense that it was tgg season again so i threw myself at it because my self control is shot to hell and like sometimes it's painful to get myself to write so i gotta take what i can get
> 
> oh and i don't touch on gatsby's guide status at all, but in my head, it's what gives him his charisma which helped him navigate social spaces as well as he does and such
> 
> my writing brain didn't like that i wrote this in 3rd person lmao


End file.
